The open area at the base of the seating wall was originally left open for a small BBQ and thyme was chosen as a green carpet to walk on. The owners have a large, beautiful covered veranda. Most of the outdoor living and cooking takes place up there but the owners wanted a quaint seating area in full sun.
This backyard entertainment space in Washington was completed in the fall of 2023 so it’s still filling and tweaks still in the works but I wanted to talk about it for a couple minutes. Groundcovers are so important in landscape design. Beyond minimizing garden maintenance by covering the ground and preventing seeds from germinating, aesthetically, they bind the garden together. In my opinion, a lot of landscapers and designers don’t put enough emphasis on groundcovers. A lot of times, I see gardens designed with a sea of mulch separating each plant. When a garden is designed where no plant touches a neighboring plant and mulch separates each plant, your eye doesn’t take the garden as a cohesive whole. I’m all for correctly spacing plants. To avoid awkwardness in newly planted landscapes, I also see a lot of landscapes where plant spacing is way too close. They are planted as if nothing will ever grow and mature. These gardens typically become a maintenance nightmare. To alleviate the situation, a lot of plants are removed within a couple years. The approach I’ve always taken as a designer is to try to pick the right plants for the right place by taking into consideration the size of the space, the soil and sun exposure. After choosing the right plant, we space these plants not on what size they are today but at a height and width it will be down the road or at least at a height that is easily manageable down the road. This is where the awkwardness usually happens with new landscape installations. A Holly might be installed at a height and width of 2.5′. Over a ten year period, that plant might become a 10’x10′ behemoth. Is the plan to let the Holly grow to 10’x10′? Or will the plant be managed somewhere in between 2.5′ and 10′? If two Hollies are planted side by side at a width of 2.5′, and will be managed at 6’x6′, they should be planted 6′ on center. Newly planted as 2.5′ plants, you’ll have 3.5′ of mulch separating each plant. This is where groundcovers become so valuable. Not only will they help prevent weeds from germinating but they will add a layer of green, that won’t interfere with the larger plants and that will help tie those plants together.
Another asset of groundcovers is they are great at softening edges. As you can see by the before and after pictures of the patio, we surrounded the patio with low, spreading edgers, softening all the hard edges of the granite.
Ajuga ‘Chocolate Chip’ softening the edge of this granite patio.
